Backups allow enterprises to recover their production systems should the need arise. Traditional backups cannot meet the requirements for scalability, shortened recovery times, and efficiency because of the enormous amounts of data being generated and processed every day. Snapshots, however, have emerged as a key technology to help drive down backup costs and improve efficiency.
Snapshots can be created very quickly because they store virtual copies of the data rather than actual copies of the data itself. In other words, the snapshots may define where and how the data is stored and organized. Traditional approaches, however, do not provide for restoring a backup snapshot of an object to a different object. Such a system would be desirable because it would allow, for example, restoring a snapshot of a production volume to a different target volume that may be used for quality assurance (QA) testing and reporting, data analytics, and so forth without having to tamper with the production volume.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions. EMC, Data Domain, Data Domain Replicator, and Data Domain Boost are trademarks of Dell EMC Corporation.